Mustangs on the move

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT)

Published 7:00 pm, Wednesday, January 9, 2008

"Immaculate is a much improved team. Much improved," Bethel coach Bob Owen said after his Wildcats defeated the Mustangs 47-21 in a South-West Conference encounter at Bethel Middle School Wednesday night. "They're tough and they're well coached by the Hayes family. They're really good people."
Danbury police officer Brian Hayes, who has been involved in a highly successful youth program that has fed the Danbury High wrestling dynasty, is building Immaculate from scratch with his son/assistant coach Anthony.
Against one of the better teams in the league, the Mustangs managed to win four matches. D.J. Christe (112), Joe Frank (119) and John Fitzgerald (145) each posted lightning-quick first-period pins. Frank needed only 26 seconds; Fitzgerald just 35 seconds.
The other victory was a hard-fought 4-1 decision by Gavin Buckley over Zak Hodza at 130.
"I wasn't really counting on that," Hayes said. "It was a great match because that kid Hodza is a very good wrestler. I thought he might win but I wasn't sure."
The Mustangs were competitive in a few other matches but came up short.
"They wrestled OK but all the close matches, most of them we lost," Hayes said. "We should have won a few of them. We knew we're not going to beat these guys. But we can win five or six matches. That's our victory. Last year that happened; this year it didn't. They have holes in their lineup but they have a lot of good wrestlers."
Bethel pulled out three matches that could've gone either way. John Coschigano edged Mike Delvalle, 3-2, at 140; Brandon Lennox secured a 3-0 win over Paul Secola at 160; and Pete Gallagher rallied in the third period and beat Andy Secola, 7-5, in overtime at 171.
The Wildcats' two standouts, Andrew Ford and Mike Danise, barely broke a sweat. Ford, the defending SWC champion at 152, needed only 35 seconds to register a pin. And Danise remained unbeaten at heavyweight, flattening his opponent in 47 seconds.
"I knew we weren't touching him," Hayes said of Danise.
Also registering pins for Bethel were Andrew Lischke (135) and Anthony Bonagura (189). Brian Dunn (103) won by tech fall, 19-3.
"They wrestled with some intensity today," Owen said. "We ended up last weekend with four matches and four wins (but) the last match there was no intensity. Today was a good day."